@inproceedings{6462,
  abstract     = {A controller is a device that interacts with a plant. At each time point,it reads the plant’s state and issues commands with the goal that the plant oper-ates optimally. Constructing optimal controllers is a fundamental and challengingproblem. Machine learning techniques have recently been successfully applied totrain controllers, yet they have limitations. Learned controllers are monolithic andhard to reason about. In particular, it is difficult to add features without retraining,to guarantee any level of performance, and to achieve acceptable performancewhen encountering untrained scenarios. These limitations can be addressed bydeploying quantitative run-timeshieldsthat serve as a proxy for the controller.At each time point, the shield reads the command issued by the controller andmay choose to alter it before passing it on to the plant. We show how optimalshields that interfere as little as possible while guaranteeing a desired level ofcontroller performance, can be generated systematically and automatically usingreactive  synthesis.  First,  we  abstract  the  plant  by  building  a  stochastic  model.Second, we consider the learned controller to be a black box. Third, we mea-surecontroller performanceandshield interferenceby two quantitative run-timemeasures that are formally defined using weighted automata. Then, the problemof constructing a shield that guarantees maximal performance with minimal inter-ference is the problem of finding an optimal strategy in a stochastic2-player game“controller versus shield” played on the abstract state space of the plant with aquantitative objective obtained from combining the performance and interferencemeasures. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by automatically con-structing lightweight shields for learned traffic-light controllers in various roadnetworks. The shields we generate avoid liveness bugs, improve controller per-formance in untrained and changing traffic situations, and add features to learnedcontrollers, such as giving priority to emergency vehicles.},
  author       = {Avni, Guy and Bloem, Roderick and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Konighofer, Bettina and Pranger, Stefan},
  booktitle    = {31st International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification},
  isbn         = {9783030255398},
  issn         = {0302-9743},
  location     = {New York, NY, United States},
  pages        = {630--649},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Run-time optimization for learned controllers through quantitative games}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-030-25540-4_36},
  volume       = {11561},
  year         = {2019},
}

@inproceedings{6490,
  abstract     = {Smart contracts are programs that are stored and executed on the Blockchain and can receive, manage and transfer money (cryptocurrency units). Two important problems regarding smart contracts are formal analysis and compiler optimization. Formal analysis is extremely important, because smart contracts hold funds worth billions of dollars and their code is immutable after deployment. Hence, an undetected bug can cause significant financial losses. Compiler optimization is also crucial, because every action of a smart contract has to be executed by every node in the Blockchain network. Therefore, optimizations in compiling smart contracts can lead to significant savings in computation, time and energy.

Two classical approaches in program analysis and compiler optimization are intraprocedural and interprocedural analysis. In intraprocedural analysis, each function is analyzed separately, while interprocedural analysis considers the entire program. In both cases, the analyses are usually reduced to graph problems over the control flow graph (CFG) of the program. These graph problems are often computationally expensive. Hence, there has been ample research on exploiting structural properties of CFGs for efficient algorithms. One such well-studied property is the treewidth, which is a measure of tree-likeness of graphs. It is known that intraprocedural CFGs of structured programs have treewidth at most 6, whereas the interprocedural treewidth cannot be bounded. This result has been used as a basis for many efficient intraprocedural analyses.

In this paper, we explore the idea of exploiting the treewidth of smart contracts for formal analysis and compiler optimization. First, similar to classical programs, we show that the intraprocedural treewidth of structured Solidity and Vyper smart contracts is at most 9. Second, for global analysis, we prove that the interprocedural treewidth of structured smart contracts is bounded by 10 and, in sharp contrast with classical programs, treewidth-based algorithms can be easily applied for interprocedural analysis. Finally, we supplement our theoretical results with experiments using a tool we implemented for computing treewidth of smart contracts and show that the treewidth is much lower in practice. We use 36,764 real-world Ethereum smart contracts as benchmarks and find that they have an average treewidth of at most 3.35 for the intraprocedural case and 3.65 for the interprocedural case.
},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar and Goharshady, Ehsan Kafshdar},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 34th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing},
  isbn         = {9781450359337},
  location     = {Limassol, Cyprus},
  pages        = {400--408},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{The treewidth of smart contracts}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3297280.3297322},
  volume       = {Part F147772},
  year         = {2019},
}

@inproceedings{10190,
  abstract     = {The verification of concurrent programs remains an open challenge, as thread interaction has to be accounted for, which leads to state-space explosion. Stateless model checking battles this problem by exploring traces rather than states of the program. As there are exponentially many traces, dynamic partial-order reduction (DPOR) techniques are used to partition the trace space into equivalence classes, and explore a few representatives from each class. The standard equivalence that underlies most DPOR techniques is the happens-before equivalence, however recent works have spawned a vivid interest towards coarser equivalences. The efficiency of such approaches is a product of two parameters: (i) the size of the partitioning induced by the equivalence, and (ii) the time spent by the exploration algorithm in each class of the partitioning. In this work, we present a new equivalence, called value-happens-before and show that it has two appealing features. First, value-happens-before is always at least as coarse as the happens-before equivalence, and can be even exponentially coarser. Second, the value-happens-before partitioning is efficiently explorable when the number of threads is bounded. We present an algorithm called value-centric DPOR (VCDPOR), which explores the underlying partitioning using polynomial time per class. Finally, we perform an experimental evaluation of VCDPOR on various benchmarks, and compare it against other state-of-the-art approaches. Our results show that value-happens-before typically induces a significant reduction in the size of the underlying partitioning, which leads to a considerable reduction in the running time for exploring the whole partitioning.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Pavlogiannis, Andreas and Toman, Viktor},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications},
  issn         = {2475-1421},
  keywords     = {safety, risk, reliability and quality, software},
  location     = {Athens, Greece},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{Value-centric dynamic partial order reduction}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3360550},
  volume       = {3},
  year         = {2019},
}

@inproceedings{25,
  abstract     = {Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are the standard models for planning under uncertainty with both finite and infinite horizon. Besides the well-known discounted-sum objective, indefinite-horizon objective (aka Goal-POMDPs) is another classical objective for POMDPs. In this case, given a set of target states and a positive cost for each transition, the optimization objective is to minimize the expected total cost until a target state is reached. In the literature, RTDP-Bel or heuristic search value iteration (HSVI) have been used for solving Goal-POMDPs. Neither of these algorithms has theoretical convergence guarantees, and HSVI may even fail to terminate its trials. We give the following contributions: (1) We discuss the challenges introduced in Goal-POMDPs and illustrate how they prevent the original HSVI from converging. (2) We present a novel algorithm inspired by HSVI, termed Goal-HSVI, and show that our algorithm has convergence guarantees. (3) We show that Goal-HSVI outperforms RTDP-Bel on a set of well-known examples.},
  author       = {Horák, Karel and Bošanský, Branislav and Chatterjee, Krishnendu},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  location     = {Stockholm, Sweden},
  pages        = {4764 -- 4770},
  publisher    = {IJCAI},
  title        = {{Goal-HSVI: Heuristic search value iteration for goal-POMDPs}},
  doi          = {10.24963/ijcai.2018/662},
  volume       = {2018-July},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{293,
  abstract     = {People sometimes make their admirable deeds and accomplishments hard to spot, such as by giving anonymously or avoiding bragging. Such ‘buried’ signals are hard to reconcile with standard models of signalling or indirect reciprocity, which motivate costly pro-social behaviour by reputational gains. To explain these phenomena, we design a simple game theory model, which we call the signal-burying game. This game has the feature that senders can bury their signal by deliberately reducing the probability of the signal being observed. If the signal is observed, however, it is identified as having been buried. We show under which conditions buried signals can be maintained, using static equilibrium concepts and calculations of the evolutionary dynamics. We apply our analysis to shed light on a number of otherwise puzzling social phenomena, including modesty, anonymous donations, subtlety in art and fashion, and overeagerness.},
  author       = {Hoffman, Moshe and Hilbe, Christian and Nowak, Martin},
  journal      = {Nature Human Behaviour},
  pages        = {397 -- 404},
  publisher    = {Nature Publishing Group},
  title        = {{The signal-burying game can explain why we obscure positive traits and good deeds}},
  doi          = {10.1038/s41562-018-0354-z},
  volume       = {2},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{297,
  abstract     = {Graph games played by two players over finite-state graphs are central in many problems in computer science. In particular, graph games with ω -regular winning conditions, specified as parity objectives, which can express properties such as safety, liveness, fairness, are the basic framework for verification and synthesis of reactive systems. The decisions for a player at various states of the graph game are represented as strategies. While the algorithmic problem for solving graph games with parity objectives has been widely studied, the most prominent data-structure for strategy representation in graph games has been binary decision diagrams (BDDs). However, due to the bit-level representation, BDDs do not retain the inherent flavor of the decisions of strategies, and are notoriously hard to minimize to obtain succinct representation. In this work we propose decision trees for strategy representation in graph games. Decision trees retain the flavor of decisions of strategies and allow entropy-based minimization to obtain succinct trees. However, decision trees work in settings (e.g., probabilistic models) where errors are allowed, and overfitting of data is typically avoided. In contrast, for strategies in graph games no error is allowed, and the decision tree must represent the entire strategy. We develop new techniques to extend decision trees to overcome the above obstacles, while retaining the entropy-based techniques to obtain succinct trees. We have implemented our techniques to extend the existing decision tree solvers. We present experimental results for problems in reactive synthesis to show that decision trees provide a much more efficient data-structure for strategy representation as compared to BDDs.},
  author       = {Brázdil, Tomáš and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Kretinsky, Jan and Toman, Viktor},
  location     = {Thessaloniki, Greece},
  pages        = {385 -- 407},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Strategy representation by decision trees in reactive synthesis}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-319-89960-2_21},
  volume       = {10805},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{310,
  abstract     = {A model of computation that is widely used in the formal analysis of reactive systems is symbolic algorithms. In this model the access to the input graph is restricted to consist of symbolic operations, which are expensive in comparison to the standard RAM operations. We give lower bounds on the number of symbolic operations for basic graph problems such as the computation of the strongly connected components and of the approximate diameter as well as for fundamental problems in model checking such as safety, liveness, and coliveness. Our lower bounds are linear in the number of vertices of the graph, even for constant-diameter graphs. For none of these problems lower bounds on the number of symbolic operations were known before. The lower bounds show an interesting separation of these problems from the reachability problem, which can be solved with O(D) symbolic operations, where D is the diameter of the graph. Additionally we present an approximation algorithm for the graph diameter which requires Õ(n/D) symbolic steps to achieve a (1 +ϵ)-approximation for any constant &gt; 0. This compares to O(n/D) symbolic steps for the (naive) exact algorithm and O(D) symbolic steps for a 2-approximation. Finally we also give a refined analysis of the strongly connected components algorithms of [15], showing that it uses an optimal number of symbolic steps that is proportional to the sum of the diameters of the strongly connected components.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Dvorák, Wolfgang and Henzinger, Monika H and Loitzenbauer, Veronika},
  location     = {New Orleans, Louisiana, United States},
  pages        = {2341 -- 2356},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{Lower bounds for symbolic computation on graphs: Strongly connected components, liveness, safety, and diameter}},
  doi          = {10.1137/1.9781611975031.151},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{311,
  abstract     = {Smart contracts are computer programs that are executed by a network of mutually distrusting agents, without the need of an external trusted authority. Smart contracts handle and transfer assets of considerable value (in the form of crypto-currency like Bitcoin). Hence, it is crucial that their implementation is bug-free. We identify the utility (or expected payoff) of interacting with such smart contracts as the basic and canonical quantitative property for such contracts. We present a framework for such quantitative analysis of smart contracts. Such a formal framework poses new and novel research challenges in programming languages, as it requires modeling of game-theoretic aspects to analyze incentives for deviation from honest behavior and modeling utilities which are not specified as standard temporal properties such as safety and termination. While game-theoretic incentives have been analyzed in the security community, their analysis has been restricted to the very special case of stateless games. However, to analyze smart contracts, stateful analysis is required as it must account for the different program states of the protocol. Our main contributions are as follows: we present (i)~a simplified programming language for smart contracts; (ii)~an automatic translation of the programs to state-based games; (iii)~an abstraction-refinement approach to solve such games; and (iv)~experimental results on real-world-inspired smart contracts.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Goharshady, Amir and Velner, Yaron},
  location     = {Thessaloniki, Greece},
  pages        = {739 -- 767},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Quantitative analysis of smart contracts}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-319-89884-1_26},
  volume       = {10801},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{325,
  abstract     = {Probabilistic programs extend classical imperative programs with real-valued random variables and random branching. The most basic liveness property for such programs is the termination property. The qualitative (aka almost-sure) termination problem asks whether a given program program terminates with probability 1. While ranking functions provide a sound and complete method for non-probabilistic programs, the extension of them to probabilistic programs is achieved via ranking supermartingales (RSMs). Although deep theoretical results have been established about RSMs, their application to probabilistic programs with nondeterminism has been limited only to programs of restricted control-flow structure. For non-probabilistic programs, lexicographic ranking functions provide a compositional and practical approach for termination analysis of real-world programs. In this work we introduce lexicographic RSMs and show that they present a sound method for almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs with nondeterminism. We show that lexicographic RSMs provide a tool for compositional reasoning about almost-sure termination, and for probabilistic programs with linear arithmetic they can be synthesized efficiently (in polynomial time). We also show that with additional restrictions even asymptotic bounds on expected termination time can be obtained through lexicographic RSMs. Finally, we present experimental results on benchmarks adapted from previous work to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.},
  author       = {Agrawal, Sheshansh and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Novotny, Petr},
  location     = {Los Angeles, CA, USA},
  number       = {POPL},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{Lexicographic ranking supermartingales: an efficient approach to termination of probabilistic programs}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3158122},
  volume       = {2},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{10883,
  abstract     = {Solving parity games, which are equivalent to modal μ-calculus model checking, is a central algorithmic problem in formal methods, with applications in reactive synthesis, program repair, verification of branching-time properties, etc. Besides the standard compu- tation model with the explicit representation of games, another important theoretical model of computation is that of set-based symbolic algorithms. Set-based symbolic algorithms use basic set operations and one-step predecessor operations on the implicit description of games, rather than the explicit representation. The significance of symbolic algorithms is that they provide scalable algorithms for large finite-state systems, as well as for infinite-state systems with finite quotient. Consider parity games on graphs with n vertices and parity conditions with d priorities. While there is a rich literature of explicit algorithms for parity games, the main results for set-based symbolic algorithms are as follows: (a) the basic algorithm that requires O(nd) symbolic operations and O(d) symbolic space; and (b) an improved algorithm that requires O(nd/3+1) symbolic operations and O(n) symbolic space. In this work, our contributions are as follows: (1) We present a black-box set-based symbolic algorithm based on the explicit progress measure algorithm. Two important consequences of our algorithm are as follows: (a) a set-based symbolic algorithm for parity games that requires quasi-polynomially many symbolic operations and O(n) symbolic space; and (b) any future improvement in progress measure based explicit algorithms immediately imply an efficiency improvement in our set-based symbolic algorithm for parity games. (2) We present a set-based symbolic algorithm that requires quasi-polynomially many symbolic operations and O(d · log n) symbolic space. Moreover, for the important special case of d ≤ log n, our algorithm requires only polynomially many symbolic operations and poly-logarithmic symbolic space.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Dvořák, Wolfgang and Henzinger, Monika H and Svozil, Alexander},
  booktitle    = {22nd International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning},
  issn         = {2398-7340},
  location     = {Awassa, Ethiopia},
  pages        = {233--253},
  publisher    = {EasyChair},
  title        = {{Quasipolynomial set-based symbolic algorithms for parity games}},
  doi          = {10.29007/5z5k},
  volume       = {57},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{79,
  abstract     = {Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a popular class of models suitable for solving control decision problems in probabilistic reactive systems. We consider parametric MDPs (pMDPs) that include parameters in some of the transition probabilities to account for stochastic uncertainties of the environment such as noise or input disturbances. We study pMDPs with reachability objectives where the parameter values are unknown and impossible to measure directly during execution, but there is a probability distribution known over the parameter values. We study for the first time computing parameter-independent strategies that are expectation optimal, i.e., optimize the expected reachability probability under the probability distribution over the parameters. We present an encoding of our problem to partially observable MDPs (POMDPs), i.e., a reduction of our problem to computing optimal strategies in POMDPs. We evaluate our method experimentally on several benchmarks: a motivating (repeated) learner model; a series of benchmarks of varying configurations of a robot moving on a grid; and a consensus protocol.},
  author       = {Arming, Sebastian and Bartocci, Ezio and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Katoen, Joost P and Sokolova, Ana},
  location     = {Beijing, China},
  pages        = {53--70},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Parameter-independent strategies for pMDPs via POMDPs}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-319-99154-2_4},
  volume       = {11024},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inbook{86,
  abstract     = {Responsiveness—the requirement that every request to a system be eventually handled—is one of the fundamental liveness properties of a reactive system. Average response time is a quantitative measure for the responsiveness requirement used commonly in performance evaluation. We show how average response time can be computed on state-transition graphs, on Markov chains, and on game graphs. In all three cases, we give polynomial-time algorithms.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan},
  booktitle    = {Principles of Modeling},
  editor       = {Lohstroh, Marten and Derler, Patricia and Sirjani, Marjan},
  pages        = {143 -- 161},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Computing average response time}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-319-95246-8_9},
  volume       = {10760},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{198,
  abstract     = {We consider a class of students learning a language from a teacher. The situation can be interpreted as a group of child learners receiving input from the linguistic environment. The teacher provides sample sentences. The students try to learn the grammar from the teacher. In addition to just listening to the teacher, the students can also communicate with each other. The students hold hypotheses about the grammar and change them if they receive counter evidence. The process stops when all students have converged to the correct grammar. We study how the time to convergence depends on the structure of the classroom by introducing and evaluating various complexity measures. We find that structured communication between students, although potentially introducing confusion, can greatly reduce some of the complexity measures. Our theory can also be interpreted as applying to the scientific process, where nature is the teacher and the scientists are the students.},
  author       = {Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Tkadlec, Josef and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Nowak, Martin},
  issn         = {1742-5662},
  journal      = {Journal of the Royal Society Interface},
  number       = {140},
  publisher    = {The Royal Society},
  title        = {{Language acquisition with communication between learners}},
  doi          = {10.1098/rsif.2018.0073},
  volume       = {15},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{2,
  abstract     = {Indirect reciprocity explores how humans act when their reputation is at stake, and which social norms they use to assess the actions of others. A crucial question in indirect reciprocity is which social norms can maintain stable cooperation in a society. Past research has highlighted eight such norms, called “leading-eight” strategies. This past research, however, is based on the assumption that all relevant information about other population members is publicly available and that everyone agrees on who is good or bad. Instead, here we explore the reputation dynamics when information is private and noisy. We show that under these conditions, most leading-eight strategies fail to evolve. Those leading-eight strategies that do evolve are unable to sustain full cooperation.Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism for cooperation based on shared moral systems and individual reputations. It assumes that members of a community routinely observe and assess each other and that they use this information to decide who is good or bad, and who deserves cooperation. When information is transmitted publicly, such that all community members agree on each other’s reputation, previous research has highlighted eight crucial moral systems. These “leading-eight” strategies can maintain cooperation and resist invasion by defectors. However, in real populations individuals often hold their own private views of others. Once two individuals disagree about their opinion of some third party, they may also see its subsequent actions in a different light. Their opinions may further diverge over time. Herein, we explore indirect reciprocity when information transmission is private and noisy. We find that in the presence of perception errors, most leading-eight strategies cease to be stable. Even if a leading-eight strategy evolves, cooperation rates may drop considerably when errors are common. Our research highlights the role of reliable information and synchronized reputations to maintain stable moral systems.},
  author       = {Hilbe, Christian and Schmid, Laura and Tkadlec, Josef and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Nowak, Martin},
  journal      = {PNAS},
  number       = {48},
  pages        = {12241--12246},
  publisher    = {National Academy of Sciences},
  title        = {{Indirect reciprocity with private, noisy, and incomplete information}},
  doi          = {10.1073/pnas.1810565115},
  volume       = {115},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{24,
  abstract     = {Partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with discounted-sum payoff are a standard framework to model a wide range of problems related to decision making under uncertainty. Traditionally, the goal has been to obtain policies that optimize the expectation of the discounted-sum payoff. A key drawback of the expectation measure is that even low probability events with extreme payoff can significantly affect the expectation, and thus the obtained policies are not necessarily risk-averse. An alternate approach is to optimize the probability that the payoff is above a certain threshold, which allows obtaining risk-averse policies, but ignores optimization of the expectation. We consider the expectation optimization with probabilistic guarantee (EOPG) problem, where the goal is to optimize the expectation ensuring that the payoff is above a given threshold with at least a specified probability. We present several results on the EOPG problem, including the first algorithm to solve it.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Elgyütt, Adrian and Novotny, Petr and Rouillé, Owen},
  location     = {Stockholm, Sweden},
  pages        = {4692 -- 4699},
  publisher    = {IJCAI},
  title        = {{Expectation optimization with probabilistic guarantees in POMDPs with discounted-sum objectives}},
  doi          = {10.24963/ijcai.2018/652},
  volume       = {2018},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{738,
  abstract     = {This paper is devoted to automatic competitive analysis of real-time scheduling algorithms for firm-deadline tasksets, where only completed tasks con- tribute some utility to the system. Given such a taskset T , the competitive ratio of an on-line scheduling algorithm A for T is the worst-case utility ratio of A over the utility achieved by a clairvoyant algorithm. We leverage the theory of quantitative graph games to address the competitive analysis and competitive synthesis problems. For the competitive analysis case, given any taskset T and any finite-memory on- line scheduling algorithm A , we show that the competitive ratio of A in T can be computed in polynomial time in the size of the state space of A . Our approach is flexible as it also provides ways to model meaningful constraints on the released task sequences that determine the competitive ratio. We provide an experimental study of many well-known on-line scheduling algorithms, which demonstrates the feasibility of our competitive analysis approach that effectively replaces human ingenuity (required Preliminary versions of this paper have appeared in Chatterjee et al. ( 2013 , 2014 ). B Andreas Pavlogiannis pavlogiannis@ist.ac.at Krishnendu Chatterjee krish.chat@ist.ac.at Alexander Kößler koe@ecs.tuwien.ac.at Ulrich Schmid s@ecs.tuwien.ac.at 1 IST Austria (Institute of Science and Technology Austria), Am Campus 1, 3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria 2 Embedded Computing Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology, Treitlstrasse 3, 1040 Vienna, Austria 123 Real-Time Syst for finding worst-case scenarios) by computing power. For the competitive synthesis case, we are just given a taskset T , and the goal is to automatically synthesize an opti- mal on-line scheduling algorithm A , i.e., one that guarantees the largest competitive ratio possible for T . We show how the competitive synthesis problem can be reduced to a two-player graph game with partial information, and establish that the compu- tational complexity of solving this game is Np -complete. The competitive synthesis problem is hence in Np in the size of the state space of the non-deterministic labeled transition system encoding the taskset. Overall, the proposed framework assists in the selection of suitable scheduling algorithms for a given taskset, which is in fact the most common situation in real-time systems design. },
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Pavlogiannis, Andreas and Kößler, Alexander and Schmid, Ulrich},
  journal      = {Real-Time Systems},
  number       = {1},
  pages        = {166 -- 207},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Automated competitive analysis of real time scheduling with graph games}},
  doi          = {10.1007/s11241-017-9293-4},
  volume       = {54},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5679,
  abstract     = {We study the almost-sure termination problem for probabilistic programs. First, we show that supermartingales with lower bounds on conditional absolute difference provide a sound approach for the almost-sure termination problem. Moreover, using this approach we can obtain explicit optimal bounds on tail probabilities of non-termination within a given number of steps. Second, we present a new approach based on Central Limit Theorem for the almost-sure termination problem, and show that this approach can establish almost-sure termination of programs which none of the existing approaches can handle. Finally, we discuss algorithmic approaches for the two above methods that lead to automated analysis techniques for almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs.},
  author       = {Huang, Mingzhang and Fu, Hongfei and Chatterjee, Krishnendu},
  editor       = {Ryu, Sukyoung},
  isbn         = {9783030027674},
  issn         = {03029743},
  location     = {Wellington, New Zealand},
  pages        = {181--201},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{New approaches for almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-030-02768-1_11},
  volume       = {11275},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5751,
  abstract     = {Because of the intrinsic randomness of the evolutionary process, a mutant with a fitness advantage has some chance to be selected but no certainty. Any experiment that searches for advantageous mutants will lose many of them due to random drift. It is therefore of great interest to find population structures that improve the odds of advantageous mutants. Such structures are called amplifiers of natural selection: they increase the probability that advantageous mutants are selected. Arbitrarily strong amplifiers guarantee the selection of advantageous mutants, even for very small fitness advantage. Despite intensive research over the past decade, arbitrarily strong amplifiers have remained rare. Here we show how to construct a large variety of them. Our amplifiers are so simple that they could be useful in biotechnology, when optimizing biological molecules, or as a diagnostic tool, when searching for faster dividing cells or viruses. They could also occur in natural population structures.},
  author       = {Pavlogiannis, Andreas and Tkadlec, Josef and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Nowak, Martin A.},
  issn         = {2399-3642},
  journal      = {Communications Biology},
  number       = {1},
  publisher    = {Springer Nature},
  title        = {{Construction of arbitrarily strong amplifiers of natural selection using evolutionary graph theory}},
  doi          = {10.1038/s42003-018-0078-7},
  volume       = {1},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inbook{59,
  abstract     = {Graph-based games are an important tool in computer science. They have applications in synthesis, verification, refinement, and far beyond. We review graphbased games with objectives on infinite plays. We give definitions and algorithms to solve the games and to give a winning strategy. The objectives we consider are mostly Boolean, but we also look at quantitative graph-based games and their objectives. Synthesis aims to turn temporal logic specifications into correct reactive systems. We explain the reduction of synthesis to graph-based games (or equivalently tree automata) using synthesis of LTL specifications as an example. We treat the classical approach that uses determinization of parity automata and more modern approaches.},
  author       = {Bloem, Roderick and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Jobstmann, Barbara},
  booktitle    = {Handbook of Model Checking},
  editor       = {Henzinger, Thomas A and Clarke, Edmund M. and Veith, Helmut and Bloem, Roderick},
  isbn         = {978-3-319-10574-1},
  pages        = {921 -- 962},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Graph games and reactive synthesis}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-319-10575-8_27},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5967,
  abstract     = {The Big Match is a multi-stage two-player game. In each stage Player 1 hides one or two pebbles in his hand, and his opponent has to guess that number; Player 1 loses a point if Player 2 is correct, and otherwise he wins a point. As soon as Player 1 hides one pebble, the players cannot change their choices in any future stage.
Blackwell and Ferguson (1968) give an ε-optimal strategy for Player 1 that hides, in each stage, one pebble with a probability that depends on the entire past history. Any strategy that depends just on the clock or on a finite memory is worthless. The long-standing natural open problem has been whether every strategy that depends just on the clock and a finite memory is worthless. We prove that there is such a strategy that is ε-optimal. In fact, we show that just two states of memory are sufficient.
},
  author       = {Hansen, Kristoffer Arnsfelt and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Neyman, Abraham},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation  - EC '18},
  isbn         = {9781450358293},
  location     = {Ithaca, NY, United States},
  pages        = {149--150},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  title        = {{The Big Match with a clock and a bit of memory}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3219166.3219198},
  year         = {2018},
}

